I find much to admire in Ms. H’s current installment, and something to add.

There are few socially constructed useful stories we domesticate ourselves with that result in greater distress and legitimate mental health problems than exactly what Mr. Dunn makes his living promoting: the absurd and harmful injunction that relatedness constructed as “biological” is somehow normative, primary, desirable, needed, and must be repaired or reestablished. The correlate messages, felt in real suffering by all the children and adults who have lived under different circumstances is: “you are missing something, you are different, less than, unconnected, lacking identity”, etc. The damage caused by promoting these messages is inestimable.

But let’s give Mr. Dunn the benefit of the doubt. After all, a popular TV show that elicits strong emotional responses must be on to something?

And I would say over 97 percent of the reunions I've done have been positive. . .

A tearful, filmed meeting with embraces is positive for whom? Ratings? What about follow-up? What about the consequent emotional lives of the reunitees? What is most likely in these cases is that the hoopla and predicted emotionality of the meeting will actually exacerbate unresolved questions that drive distress in adoptees/separated children and adults: “If this is how it was supposed to be, this is who I was supposed to be with, loved by, connected with, then what went wrong? Why? Why was I separated?” All the expected, orchestrated, strong positive emotions for the “real”, “biological”, “natural” “family member” must be the correct feelings (everybody says so), so why did it happen? In kids, and adults, the unanswered “why did it happen” part, without reality testing and reframing, remains as confusion, guilt, self-blame, depression, and a host of other problems. Now I’m expected to love and feel connected to a person I don’t know. Maybe with the magic utterance “I’m sorry.”?

The reality testing and reframing needed to get past guilt, stigmatization, and negative self-attributions are blocked by what Dunn does: constructing biological relatedness as normative and essentialist while at the same time avoiding real explanations for separations that would allow understanding and resolution: like: “details of the family situation . . . ugly details and big chunks of the story . . . drinking problems, for example, or the details of abusive relationships, although it's easy to see that these factors are present in many cases.” Until abandonment is courageously and truthfully reframed in ways that those abandoned can make sense of what happened without devaluing and blaming themselves, until permission is gained to attribute dysfunction and anger correctly to imperfect "parents" and others and to choose whether to connect with them, continued distress is predictable.

More basically, the entire prospect and idea of reunification is based on a lie about human relatedness. If good guys tell the truth, then Michael’s Dad was indeed a “good guy” because in fact, how it matters most, Michael has no siblings. The hapless subjects in these episodes will gain nothing but confusion and distress, after the tearful vignettes, from the beliefs we make up and force on them that they somehow “need” or “should” be connected to other individuals who happened to exit the same birth canal, or whose birth canal they exited. Unless of course, astonishingly, somehow human relatedness could convincingly be constructed as reduced to limbic drives, sources of semen, carnality, and birth canals. Ha! . . . . . . . . Oh . . . . wait . . . . I guess we actually . . . . . . right. Never mind. Great show.